cradles, eddies: and silently flows the river
by Kalliel
Summary: You are five years old when I put two things into your hands: your brother's life, and the weapon you will use to take mine from me. -- Mikoto reflects on the child she inevitably loses. Itachi reflects nothing.


**cradles, eddies** _(and silently flows the river)_  
_Naruto fan fiction_

**Genre:** gen, character study, angst, pre-series  
**Characters:** Itachi, Mikoto  
**Rating:** G (K)  
**Word Count:** around 1100  
**Notes:** For Naruto Contest on LJ's Week #44, "children."

_

* * *

You are thirteen months old, and you are learning to walk. _

_Your legs curl under you like you are still being carried, still safe inside your mother's womb. I can feel your skin and your baby fat slide across your ribs as I support you; and I think not for the first time, nor even the third, that even though my hands can reach around your chest, they don't really belong there. _

_I wonder what it will be like, the day I can no longer put my arms around you._

_You begin to whine, like a little cat, because you sense my attentions have wandered. Somehow, you can always tell. You bat your feet against the ground, a soldier's march. You are growing up (too) quickly. I hold you up like I'm carrying a hot pot--gingerly hands in the pits below your arms. We move forward._

_And it's the funniest thing, the way you try. I would laugh, but it's been a long time since these walls have had to hold in laughter, and it would be a shame to let the world in on our secret. Anyway, I want the first laugh to be yours._

_You're not a little cat, but a little gosling. When your feet touch the ground, you never fail to rise up on tiptoe. You're trying to swim in air, and my dear child, that's not what you do. (You can still drown in it, however.)_

_We make it across the entire front room, you in your marching swimming walking, and me on my knees behind you. You start to cry; you are tired, or hungry, or unclean._

_When you are thirteen years old, you will make that same journey in under four seconds. I won't have time to cry, to scream._

_(But Sasuke will.)_

--

Mikoto's hands press on his shoulders, wet-warm. White and water-shriveled, they slide into his world like the rest of the evening August air, nothing because they are indiscernible from everything. It is as close to a hug as she has come in a long while, Itachi knows, but he will delve no further.

The leaves are turning, dusky green into dawn reds, oranges; and the days are spinning much the same; and the moon sits, bloated and bottom heavy, sagging somewhere in between. Everything is changing, nothing is changing, and in Itachi's best estimations, it will not matter either way. He folds himself neatly into a corner, back brushed tentatively against the shouji, and watches everything and nothing.

Mikoto leaves. Back into the house, the swish of her black dress coaxing a ripple of breeze into dead summer air—she moves, and is gone, and the world settles back into the same general order, like rainwater into footprints as the walker moves forward.

--

Rain pads the world in pools of silence.

Hot rain, like the season and the late noon promised, and the moon is obscured by storm-laden clouds. The air is thick enough to smother children, and the baby, Sasuke, is silent when Mikoto brings him forth.

Mikoto's words drop like stones into the rain-glass. It is this day that something shatters, something riven by cracks and fissures a long time coming, but whole enough to mask the damage.

_How lucky, isn't he Sasuke-chan? to be your big brother. And how lucky you are to have Itachi, who will protect you, always._

She bounces the baby, Sasuke, in her lap, and Itachi wonders if a time will ever come when that name is not an afterthought. The baby, Sasuke. The brother, Sasuke. The Uchiha, Sasuke. Itachi thinks, probably not.

_He's growing up so fast isn't he, Itachi. Getting so _big—Mikoto looks up at her oldest child, eyes beseeching recognition from him, hands beseeching movement towards them. She doesn't know (how can she know?) that every word she speaks sends jagged ripples through his mind, every touch begs the rain fall harder, and he can barely hear her over the storm outside, much less the one within. Concentration, con-cen-tration.

(How can she know?)

_Growing up so fast, Sasuke-chan! _

_And so are you, Itachi._

--

The baby's, Sasuke's, weight is heavy in his arms. Coaxed to stillness by this late (rather, not yet dead, still dying) summer evening, the very air is his swaddling blanket. His chubby baby legs kick languidly against the pressure they all three can feel, but change nothing. His hair, new-wet from the bath Mikoto has given him, is conflicted. Part droops down, plasters to his round face, and part sticks straight up—a lightning rod seeking current.

Mikoto pats these down, to no avail, and the same hand brushes Itachi's own lank bangs behind his ears.

"Careful; watch his head, Itachi," she says, guides his hands to the limp folds of skin at the base of the baby's, Sasuke's, neck, and the plump white cloth wrapped around his bottom. Itachi's arms tense, lock awkwardly in place, like a crane made graceless by _rigor mortis_. But he holds the baby—Sasuke—he holds the baby for the first and last time, and the sun lingers in the sky; and the moon, caught in the maple branches, lingers too; and it's like this moment will never end.

Itachi just watches (the baby's, Sasuke's) his head.

--

_Little Brother Sasuke scares you a little, I think. Your indifference is, as always, flawless, but you back into the shadows sleeping in the corners of the room as though you are trying to disappear. I can understand._

_Sasuke is younger than you in more ways than one. He is an infant, yes, and you are a growing boy--a big brother, now. But it has been five years, and Konoha is not the place it once was, and it is getting better bit by bit. It is not a time for resentments. Not many of your kin can see that. I don't; not yet._

_You will._

_You are five years old when I put two things into your hands: your brother's life, and the weapon you will use to take mine from me._

--

Time walks on fractured legs, and not always forward.

--

Mikoto has another thing to give him—and not the child, Sasuke, still low and heavy in her womb.

A metallic tang bleeds from it, mixing with the thick steamed rice smell caught in Mikoto's hair and apron. Itachi is seized with a desperate, desperate unease that he is not sure what to do with, and he forces it out into the room, where it spreads, feathers, one more layer in a house full of them.

_Kunai_, says Mikoto.

Itachi knows; he has seen, but never felt, one. It is heavy in his hand, hard, unmoving. The tail winds into a ring, unending. Time stretches and straightens out and Itachi knows, has always known, what will come, unerring.

Kunai, she says. Happy birthday. There are words in between, but Itachi fails to discern them. "_Careful! _Watch its head—" It's _sharp_.

Itachi watches its head.

--

_You were just like this_, she tells him. You were just like this when you were born. Would you like to hold him?

Time hiccups, and then--

"No."

* * *

end.  
23-24 May 2009

Constructive criticism (or just criticism) is desired and adored. ^^


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